How to Break Your Worst Work Habits
We can all admit that a bad work habit is holding us back. Maybe we interrupt people all the time, or we are chronically late for appointments, or we have an excuse for everything that goes awry.
This post originally appeared on the Help Scout blog .
Habit, as BR Andrews wrote in the American Journal of Psychology as early as 1903, “is a more or less fixed way of thinking, wanting, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of mental experience.”
What we’ve learned more recently is that habits – personal, organizational, or social – are a subconscious loop. As psychologist Jeremy Dean writes in Creating Habits, Quitting Habits , “not thinking,” or “automatism,” is a central component of a habit. ”
These subconscious loops, as Charles Duhigg points out in his bestseller The Power of Habit , more or less follow the same pattern: the signal (or “trigger”) that triggers your brain on autopilot, the routine you follow, and the reward. which you receive. from performing this action, which amplifies the action on the signal the next time it appears.
My own worst work habit, for example, is chatting between email, Slack, Trello, and Twitter notifications, while the heavier, high-priority tasks (like oh, I don’t know, writing this article) get shelved.
A signal is the completion of one task – for example, answering an email – that signals the desire to move on to the next task (“now what?”). My routine is to test all my apps and immediately address any new things that await me there – often a Slack message or other email. The reward is the satisfaction I get from feeling productive by completing multiple tasks. The problem, of course, is that I haven’t resolved my priorities and my to-do list hasn’t changed at all.
“Over time,” writes Duhigg, “this loop is a signal, a routine, a reward; signal, routine, reward – it becomes more and more automatic. Signal and reward are intertwined until a strong sense of anticipation and passion arises. In the end … a habit is born. “
Despite my best intentions at the start of each day, the dopamine rush that comes from checking my notifications is hard to ignore. I don’t seem to have read many well-meaning articles on how “context switching is killing productivity!” can counteract the neurological trench that this habit has deeply rooted in my basal ganglia.
Undoubtedly, you feel like a prisoner of some habit that also holds you back. So how do you fix this?
How to break bad habits
Take an interest in the moment
The first step in breaking any bad habit is mindfulness. When you are mindful of the moments that need to be automated, completion is no longer a foregone conclusion. The more we understand what causes our signals, routines, and rewards, the less power our habits have over us. In a TED talk on injecting curiosity into our habits, psychiatrist Judson Brewer argues that we can begin to change our habits by being mindful when we play the habit loop.
“What if, instead of fighting our brains,” he asks, “… we just got really curious about what was going on in our instantaneous experience?” He cites the example of smokers who bring mindfulness to the smoking process, which ultimately leads to frustration with this behavior – a method that Brewer says is twice as effective as the current “gold standard of therapy for helping people quit smoking.”
I gave curiosity a chance. As soon as I felt the familiar cue to mark a task and the subsequent coercion to see who retweeted me, I slowed down and asked myself what was really going on. Of course there was dopamine testing notifications and a healthy dose of FOMO. But the main reason I’m mindlessly looping from app to app? I fool myself into thinking that I am being productive.
“[] Being busy on weekdays gives us a false sense of productivity that is not fair to indulge,” writes Laura Vanderkam in her book 168 Hours . “A lot does not mean that you are doing something important.” Playing mole with my notifications is far from the best use of my time, but it definitely makes me feel like I’m busy, important, and busy.
Really disappointing. Realizing what I get from this habit — a false sense of productivity — was the first powerful step toward changing it. But I needed a replacement.
Transforming Bad Habits by Replacing Routines
While you cannot completely eradicate the habit, you can fix it by replacing the routine that occurs between the cue and the reward. “This is the rule,” Duhigg writes. “If you use the same signal and give the same reward, you can change your routine and change your habit. Almost any behavior can be changed if the signal and reward remain the same. ” What a liberating formula! (At least one company hopes to capitalize on this insight by selling a device that replaces the “routine” segment of the habit loop with an electric shock .)
Now when I complete one task and ask: “What’s next?” The signal arrives, my replacement procedure is to alert my team that I am going down and close everything except the tools I need to complete the current task. The reward is the same: satisfaction from the feeling of being productive. But right now, it’s real productivity, not laziness in a convincing Halloween costume.
The Hidden Benefits of Habit Reform
The wonderful added benefit of kicking one bad habit is that positive changes are reflected in other areas of our lives. While we do not know exactly why this is happening, we at least know that it is and that this principle applies not only to our individual lives, but also to societies and organizations. When, for example, Paul O’Neill took over at the helm of the aluminum giant Alcoa, he chose to hone worker safety. Duhigg argues that focusing on reforming this key habit has made Alcoa one of the most successful companies in the Dow Jones.
What can happen if you choose one bad habit and take an interest in it for a week or so? After you define the line, routine, and reward, can you find new behavior to insert into the “routine” slot? What can happen in your company if you change one key habit, say, the way you hold meetings or hire new employees ? How can these initial shifts cause positive chain reactions?
“Once you realize that habits can change,” Duhigg writes, “you have the freedom — and the responsibility — to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be restored, the strength of the habit will become easier to recognize, and the only way out is to get to work. “